Pan-Cancer Project

Cancer is a disease of the genome, caused by a cell's acquisition of somatic mutations in key cancer genes. These mutations alter pathways involved in regulating cellular growth and interactions with the tissue environment. Until recently, research on the cancer genome was focused on protein-coding genes, which together account for only 1% of the genome. To address this issue, the ICGC/TCGA Pan-Cancer Analysis of Whole Genomes (PCAWG) Project performed whole‑genome sequencing and integrative analysis on more than 2,600 primary cancers and their matching normal tissues across 38 distinct tumour types.

Nature, Nature Genetics, Nature Biotechnology, Nature Communications and Communications Biology have published a collection of 22 papers, accompanied by a Comment, News&Views and Editorial. The content collection can be accessed online and includes papers on Structural variation, Tumour evolution, Mutational signatures, Cancer drivers, Gene regulation and Tools.